[ Q 4 , 1 ] “It is not right to say that the city is like an organism, but it is perhaps more telling and normatively useful to say that the city is a hyperorganism; that is to say it has to find whatever accommodation it might desire not in letting go of self-control and self-discipline but instead introducing them in their self-transcending dimension. Rightly so, if we truly believe that the self-creational character of becoming is for real. The art of living belongs to such a self-transcending dimension.
“An organism is under the rule of subordination, that is, the discipline necessary to maintain a hierarchy of participation among its organs. A city is under the rule of insubordination, that is, the unwillingness to accept the system. The self-control of the organism is not available to the city. Two alternatives: either the city succeeds in being the transcendence of the organism’s rigor—the city as a hyperorganism; or the city winds up a creature of chaos—a state that can advance in becoming only if it transcends its own nature, into hyperchaos.
It is a question of genes versus memes. An organism is under the dictate of its own genes. The genes of the palm tree have been its disciplinarian for millions of years—same genes, same tree. A city formulates itself under the collective demands of its memes, in constant evolution and devolution. In the tree, there is the process of the young seedling inescapably guided toward being the palm tree and only the palm tree. The comfort available to the palm tree, courtesy of its gene matrix, is not afforded to the city, captive as it is of its own mercurial memes.
The metastasis of the city, the preference for hermit pseudoculture, and the predilection for the car have succeeded in designing the sterile automobile landscapes of suburbia. The qualifications of hermitage culture are bigness, flatness, isolation, logistical crippling, land destruction, soil decay, aquifer degradation, quarantine of forests, pollution, and, inevitably, materialism—a biblical-style catastrophe.

( Paolo Soleri, Chapter IV, Conversations with Paolo Soleri – https://organism.earth/library/document/conversations-with-paolo-soleri)